Swimming pool
by planet p
Summary: As the title infers, involving a swimming pool.


**Swimming pool** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

**Author's Notes** I don't know why I wrote this, I was feeling sick all day. Present tense, third person. Miss Parker's POV. Painful and totally awful.

* * *

The water is dark. But it is a swimming pool. Why is the water so dark? The water is very dark. When she looks into the pool it goes on and on forever. The further she looks into the swimming pool the darker the water becomes. Her gaze does not reach the bottom and see the light reflected back up toward her, making her face bright with the light playing on her cheeks, her nose, her brow.

The water is so dark it is black. She thinks that she would see an image of herself staring back up at her from inside the black water, but she does not see herself. All she sees is the darkness of the water.

Something slaps her leg. It is wet and slimy on her skin. It drags across her leg and slithers over her skin and tries loosely to wrap itself around her leg.

She tears her eyes from the black water and jerks back from the edge of the swimming pool in something between a stumble and a step.

The thing grabs her foot, tries to drag her down, tries to pull her down to it, into its ready arms, but when she looks there is nothing.

There is nothing on her leg, nothing on her foot or her shoe (she is wearing high heels); there is nothing on the concrete she is standing on top of with her black high heels. She peers down at the concrete around her high heels and makes her eyes small by squeezing her eyelids closed a bit, but there is not even any water, like a snail's trail, like the slimy thing that had grabbed her leg.

She lets her eyes open again, so that she can see normally, without the little black patches in the corner of her vision which was reduced and much smaller in scope before, or spots in her eyes. Now she can see properly again, and she sees that there is nothing on her leg, nothing on the concrete.

Her eyes move to the swimming pool, caterpillar-like, or like a worm, inch by inch, and she sees that the water is bright and clear and she can see all the way to the bottom of the swimming pool, can see the light that plays like a flock of mermaids across the tiles and across the surface of the water and, although she cannot see it, across her own face making it glow, making her cheeks, her nose, her brow glow.

She lifts her eyes from the water. The brightness is making her eyes sting and water and spots play in front of her eyes again.

She lifts her eyes and sees Sydney, his back to her, reading a notice on a wall.

Broots is staring into the small screen of his cell phone, squinting to see something, or as though he thinks this will improve the reception. It stains a small patch of his face on his right cheek blue, even his normally brown eye shines strangely blue, a strange glancing sheen of blue across the usual brown like oil across water, the other eye still brown.

She shifts her gaze to see Sam standing guard at the entrance. He looks bored, tired, but he still looks good in that suit, she thinks.

She is tired too, and her leg still tingles from where nothing touched it, from where she imagined that something had touched it.

And there is Lyle, staring at the water but not seeing it, instead seeing something else, thinking about something else.

She has looked away from Sam and is watching her brother. He doesn't blink, but then he looks up and sees her watching him.

The water is bright now, but his eyes have gone dark, like the water before. He turns away from her and makes his way toward Broots who is frowning heavily.

The patch of blue shifts across his face shifts and disappears as he lowers the cell phone from his face and watches Lyle approach.

"Try this," Lyle says, and passes him his cell phone.

She doesn't see Broots' expression or what happens next because Sydney is walking toward her, making his way around the bright pool with its bright water, and she is watching him getting closer and closer, and trying not to think about Sam in his dark suit which she can't remember if it is black or navy or dark grey. Sydney's suit is black. It makes her think of coffee.

It is the middle of the night and she is standing next to a swimming pool and she is tired and she wants a coffee and to go to sleep.

Except Jarod had decided that cleaning swimming pools was a very exciting and heroic thing to do, and that meant that no coffee was needed, at least not for her.

She forgets about Jarod, depriving her of much needed sleep – she had started to hallucinate that something was touching her when clearly nothing was – and waits for Sydney to speak.

And then they are no longer at the swimming pool, and she is drinking hot coffee, and she can see in the glass of the roadhouse window, her eyes are tired, and Sam is sitting next to her and his suit is navy.


End file.
